2009-01-03

Ideological War

A lot of times I don't know how to explain myself, because some things are just "obvious" to me, and I don't know what assumptions are built-in that I haven't elaborated and justified until I stumble across it in a debate.

This time I was in a debate with a Taiwanese guy and he was claiming that I was just sitting at my computer instead of taking "real action". I asked him what "real action" was to liberate Iran, protect America or whatever, given that this was an IDEOLOGICAL WAR. Of course he couldn't answer. No-one ever can. They just like to throw mud. But it did occur to me that I had never actually elaborated that before.

The thing about 9/11 is that the perpetrators were just individuals, not a state. This forced America to deal with an ideology (similar to communism or Nazism) rather than just one rogue country that got it into its head that it wanted to fight. US troops were already IN Saudi Arabia, as guests! It wasn't really possible to order the US military to invade Saudi Arabia without at least first having the decency to LEAVE! Actually, one of the reasons for the attack was that Saudi opinion was divided as to whether US troops should be in the "holy" land or not!

So now the war needed to be fought worldwide. Every country in the world, even the US (think Wright) has people who subscribe to this ideology that the US deserved to be attacked. And if you want to protect yourself from this enemy you need to:

1. Isolate the exact ideology that is causing people to want to hurt America.2. Convert the convertable from that ideology to an ideology that wants to either protect America, or be neutral.3. Kill or capture or neuter the unconvertable.

With respect to 1, real action is in fact, RESEARCH. You don't just run aimlessly around Afghanistan shooting guys holding weapons. Sure, that's needed too (in a large part to assist with the research), but these Taliban morons with pea-shooters are just a symptom. And the Afghan National Army who are hunting them down are a symptom of part of the solution! But the entire mess needed to be reconciled. What was causing these Afghan Muslims to form violently diametrically opposed ideologies? The real action - research - was indeed done to explain these forces, and the answer was finally produced in message 666. This shows why one group of Muslims are on one side, allied with the US, while the other is on the other side.

With respect to 2, real action is in fact trying to convert the enemy! This requires laying out a logical argument to people and trying to convince them to stop hating America by seeing a different perspective. This campaign is not yet up to the military stage in places like Egypt and Pakistan etc etc. But it can be done via contacting these people over the internet, with the idea being to convert them, then asking them to assist in converting others, including their own family, so that we can end up with 95% of Egypt abhorring the 9/11 attacks and instead assisting with hunting down the religious bigots in their own country and making it socially unacceptable. Most people are too cowardly to go outside of what "popular opinion" is.

With respect to 3, real action is in fact the military aiming a gun at a Taliban and squeezing the trigger. However, that's a minority of the military, and it doesn't operate alone. There are support personnel, there are pilots, there are mechanics and there are people who pay for all this. Basically the entire country (minus leeches) are involved in the war effort - even the unwitting anti-war who are incensed that their tax dollars are being used for this purpose. And real action also includes stopping those tax-payers from being incensed and support the military campaign. All the components of the military are volunteers, and there are replacements available for all of them. Having 21 million Australians line up for the very narrow job spec of shooting bullets at the Taliban is a non-starter. Explaining this to morons is also part of the real action. And above all that, those people who shoot bullets won't even be ALLOWED to do that (even though they are perfectly happy to) if the general public doesn't support that. So once again, the real action (and in fact, this is where the battle was lost when the Australian people elected a treacherous PM who pulled the troops out of Iraq) is to get the public behind these wars.

In a nutshell, the battleground for an ideological war is not Helmand, Afghanistan. It is the mainstream media, newspapers, radio, and the internet. All around the world. There are already lots of people engaged in this war. Fox News is one of the fighters. But getting people to actually watch Fox News and ignore the ridicule from the nasty left-wing is also part of that battle.

So, the war continues on all these levels. I have already done everything "real" I can think of. If everyone was doing what I was doing, we'd have 10,000 Australian troops in Iraq today because the government needed to respond to the pressure. The reason we don't have Australians killing insurgents in Iraq is not because our military is incompetent. It is far from that. Some consider our soldiers to be the world's best (personally I would go with America now that they are the most combat-experienced). Certainly before the war I would go with Australia or Israel.

Note that we're up against a tough opponent. Their heads are locked solid with concrete. It's a bit like trying to argue with a communist rabitting on about how capitalists exploit the poor and that if we could just implement what's in this book, we'll have a wonderful world. And you try to point them to the Soviet Union's crimes and they tell you that's all American propaganda. No communist atrocity is unable to be spun. It actually took the collapse of the Soviet Union and the Russians themselves saying "communism sucks" before the commie scum in our own countries decided to change tactics and just bring capitalism down to the same disastrous result of communism by insisting that fine, let's try capitalism, but it's important that we do it without breathing. Well, we need to run industry without producing carbon dioxide, anyway. Let's see you try that, huh! Let's see whether capitalism really works under realistic constraints like not producing carbon dioxide! And that's part of yet another ideological war, although it's already covered by message 666 (war against DOGMA, in this case the communist dogma).